Lance Storm: WWE Specifically Told Me To Be Monotone And Robotic, Their Vision Was ‘Sam The Eagle’ From The Muppets
Photo Credit: WWE
Lance Storm says if you thought he had no personality in WWE, it’s because the company was telling him to be that way and he would often retape promos for not being boring enough.
Lance Storm was recently interviewed by the It’s My House podcast and was asked about Bruce Prichard’s recent remarks about him lacking personality during his WWE run. During a recent episode of his Something To Wrestle With podcast [on AdFreeShows.com], Prichard complimented Storm on his in-ring work but said he didn’t have a lot of personality.
Storm responded, saying he had never had an issue with personality in ECW or WCW and explained how it was all part of the plan when he joined WWE. Storm went on to say that he was told to be robotic, and cited “Sam The Eagle” from The Muppets as a source of inspiration.
“The thing is—I honestly believe this is the misnomer, of people getting worked or believing their own shit. If you go back and watch my ECW stuff, no one’s gonna say I had a lack of personality or a lack of character. And in WCW, the particular character that I was doing was getting me very over in a very short period of time. When I got to WWE, I was specifically told and instructed to have no emotion, no personality, and be a robot. I was specifically told that their vision for me was ‘Sam the Eagle’ from The Muppets, and when I did promos in WWE I was constantly told to do retakes because ‘you’re not flat enough, you’re not monotone enough, we want you duller,’ and they would make me do retakes and retakes and retakes,” Storm stated. “Because that’s what they told me they wanted, so that’s what I did, because I’m a professional.
“And then it’s either a case of one hand not listening to the other, or them wanting certain things to fail, or I think it’s more one not knowing the other, that someone had a vision of ‘[Lance] is going to be this guy with a stick up his ass and be flat’ but after several months of doing flat, monotone promos—because that’s what they kept telling me, and if I didn’t do it flat enough, they’d make me retape it,” he explained. “[Chris] Jericho came to me and said, ‘Do you realize you’re getting buried in production meetings for being flat and monotone in your promos?’ I just looked at him and said, ‘They’re making me do this shit!’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, well you’re getting buried for not having any personality in the production meetings.’ And I’m like, ‘well, then they’re f-cking morons’ because they’re the ones telling me to do this.
“Now it may be a case of one hand—and it very well could have been one writer had this vision for me of a monotone robot, but then they’re in the production meeting and Vince [McMahon] loses his shit or Bruce Prichard, whoever, ‘Goddammit, get this guy some personality!’ That writer doesn’t want to step up and take the heat and go, ‘Well, I told him to do it that way’ because then he’s going to get yelled at and [told] that’s a stupid idea,” he said. “So that writer could have said ‘I’ll do what I can with him but he’s got no personality’, and then you’re labeled.”
A match done on zero sleep. Chavo and I were at Jericho’s wedding the night before. I left the wedding grabbed a bite to eat at Denny’s with Don Callis and went right to the airport for an early morning flight to Nitro https://t.co/iDBk3ckdwI
— Lance Storm (@LanceStorm) July 31, 2021
Storm went on to say that he might have a selective memory in this regard, but you can see he started to show more personality in the Un-Americans stable, so he wasn’t always seen in the same light. He noted that was a Vince McMahon gimmick and Vince wrote their material, specifically workshopping some of the promos with each other before Storm would do them on television. He said people might only look back on his initial run as the boring guy and call him a poor promo, but no one knew that he was also being told to intentionally go as flat as he could.
“It is what it is, and at least he complimented my work,” Storm said. “It’s also possible that Bruce was never a part of the conversations where they told me to be flat. In which case then it’s—Bruce is just not realizing that that was by design. And if he was part of those conversations, he either forgets it or just decides it’s a better narrative to deliver it this way, but again, to be honest, when I was in WWE, [The Rock] and [Steve Austin] were there the whole time and it’s like, even if they’re not telling me to have a flat promo, I’m not going to have a better promo than The Rock and Austin. I wouldn’t have put the world title on me in WWF between 2001-2004 either, and I held every other championship, so it’s like ‘he didn’t win the major title’—Yeah, I didn’t win the world title, but I wouldn’t have put it on me, either because Rock, Austin, Jericho, [Triple H], Booker [T] were all there at the time, and I would’ve pushed those guys over me too.”
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